Ceci Ne Sont Pas Des Lunettes*

The teenagers, Kevin Nguyen, 16, and TJ Khayatan, 17, both of San Jose, had been left scratching their heads at the simplicity of some of the museum’s exhibits, including two stuffed animals on a blanket.

“Is this really what you call art?” Kevin said in an interview over the weekend.

TJ added, “We looked at it and we were like, ‘This is pretty easy. We could make this ourselves.’ ”

Cue the long-standing first reaction to a Pollack: “My five year old could do better!”

Nguyen and Khayatan, however, did the hard thing: put their ambition to the test. Theirs was no instant success:

Inspired during their visit on May 21, they experimented with putting a jacket on the floor and then a baseball cap, but neither drew attention.

Like any driven artist, the two persisted, until, the breakthrough!

Kevin then placed his Burberry glasses on the floor beneath a placard describing the theme of the gallery. He said neither he nor TJ did anything to influence museum visitors, such as standing around and looking at the glasses.

The linked article has a picture of what came next…;-)

Not that the creators could fully appreciate their success. One does have to sacrifice for art:

Within about three minutes, people appeared to be viewing their handiwork as bona fide art, though Kevin said that without his glasses, he could not see what was happening too well.

Anyway — good times! And nothing to do with the ferret headed weasel (a sphinx for our times!), the senator from the north country, nor the lady whose nomination must not be acknowledged. So I guess this makes it just fun. Happy Tuesday, all.

*Well. Actually…they are, in exactly the sense that Magritte argued that his pipe was not.

One Comment on “Ceci Ne Sont Pas Des Lunettes*”

They learned a valuable lesson about art and how value is assessed in a society. Veblen would have been proud.

“A stress on aristocratic meat-eating, for example, genuinely does seem to be an innovation of (among others) the Franks; it was not part of Roman cuisine, where status was conveyed by the complexity and the cost of ingredients, but first appears in a treatise about diet written for the Frankish king Theuderic 1(511-33) by a doctor of Greek origin called Anthimus, and it continued throughout the Middle Ages.” from “The Inheritance of Rome”